Honest Burgers closes its only Smash + Grab site
The Liverpool Street smashburger spot opened in 2024 after a £2.7m crowdfund; the 45-site chain still wants to quadruple its estate by 2030.
Honest Burgers has closed Smash + Grab, its only standalone smashburger site, near London's Liverpool Street.
The spot opened in late 2024 inside a converted existing unit, built around seven burger options plus chicken tenders, chips, milkshakes and beer. A breakfast menu was bolted on in 2025.
The concept traded on speed: smashburgers that the brand said cook in under two minutes, pressed thin on a hot griddle rather than grilled slow. A 2023 crowdfunding round raised £2.7m to back the format, pitched at the time as a way to "challenge the big guys."
A test that did not clear the bar the core brand is held to
One closure inside a bigger expansion
The closure sits oddly against the rest of Honest Burgers' year. The chain now runs 45 restaurants across the UK and bought 12 former GBK sites in 2025, spread across London, the South East, the Midlands and East Anglia. It has said it wants to quadruple its estate by 2030.
The UK burger trade has had a strange year for crossovers too, including Burger Shot's leap out of GTA 6 and into a real Miami arena stand.
Smash + Grab is not the first side format Honest Burgers has pulled back. V Honest, a standalone vegan spin-off launched in 2022, returned to the main menu after less than a year running on its own.
The pattern suggests a chain comfortable testing formats fast and cutting them faster, rather than one chasing growth at any format. Founders Tom Barton and Philip Eeles built the business in Brighton in 2009 on a single idea: a burger, done one way, done well.
What a 45-site burger chain learns from a single closure
Honest Burgers has not said why the site shut, and the company has not disclosed what happens to the Liverpool Street unit next. The GBK acquisition still has to prove itself over multiple sites and formats before 2030's quadrupling target becomes credible.
For now, Smash + Grab's short run reads as a test that did not clear the bar the core brand is held to, even as the chain keeps expanding everywhere else.
